Inheritance

Her Own Kind of Annenberg

It sometimes seems as if Wallis Annenberg is single-handedly funding L.A., with all the community projects, art centers, and medical buildings that bear her name. As she takes charge of the $1.6 billion foundation created by her late media-mogul father, Walter, the author finds the 70-year-old heiress in full bloom.

Wallis Annenberg with Bonnie, her standard poodle, in her home in Century Woods, a gated community adjacent to Century City; Walter and Lee Annenberg arriving at the Reagan White House for a state dinner, 1988. Photograph by Jonathan Becker; by Ron Sachs/Sygma/Corbis.

‘I’ve never had a problem using the Annenberg name,” says Wallis Annenberg, the only surviving child of the late billionaire media tycoon, art collector, philanthropist, and ambassador to Great Britain Walter Annenberg. “That’s who I am, and I’m happy to be that. I’m very proud of it. But I want to be worthy. Because it opens a lot of doors, and I want to be the best person I can to walk through them.” Reportedly worth $200 million herself, she is sitting in the backseat of her chauffeured Mercedes Maybach, along with her three Maltese—Muffet, Switters, and Coco. (She also has a standard poodle—“I seem to get a new dog every time a relationship ends,” says Annenberg, a longtime divorcée.) In her no-nonsense black pantsuit, flats, and a chunky amber-and-crystal necklace, Annenberg, who recently turned 70, comes across more as a wise Jewish mother than as a haughty society heiress—a dame, not a grande dame. As devoted to Big Ten football as she is to high culture, she talks in quick, precise bursts, delivered in an earthy contralto, and tells me, “I would rather sit in a basement on a barrel and eat a hamburger with some interesting person than be in a palace, where I could get scared out of my wits.”

We are being driven through Downtown Los Angeles for a meeting with the dean and faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The school was founded by her father in 1971, a dozen years after he had established the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where the family company, Triangle Publications (TV Guide, Seventeen, The Philadelphia Inquirer), was based. After selling Triangle to Rupert Murdoch for $3 billion in 1988, Walter used a third of the proceeds to set up the Annenberg Foundation, which currently has assets of about $1.6 billion, and which he ran, Wallis says, as “a one-man show.” Upon his death, in 2002, his widow, Wallis’s stepmother, Lee, became chairman and president; Wallis was made vice president, with three of her four children joining her on the board of trustees. With Lee’s passing, in March of this year, Wallis became chairman and president of America’s 24th-largest foundation, and her three children became vice presidents. The foundation’s headquarters have been moved to Los Angeles from Radnor, Pennsylvania, with smaller offices maintained in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Betsy Bloomingdale, a close family friend, says, “Wallis is becoming the Brooke Astor of Los Angeles.” Another friend, Carol Price, sees Wallis as “the new Buff Chandler,” referring to the wife of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, who was the city’s social and philanthropic queen in the 1960s and 70s. Entertainment tycoon David Geffen adds, “Wallis seems to be dedicating herself to making life in Los Angeles better for so many people, and she’s succeeding big-time. It’s impossible not to like her.”

God knows, with the Los Angeles Times filing for bankruptcy, the Museum of Contemporary Art having to be rescued by billionaire developer Eli Broad, and the Hollywood hierarchy forced to cut back in the wake of the Bernard Madoff rip-off, the City of Angels is more than ready for a new benefactor. “Everyone loves to see Wallis coming,” says producer Gary Pudney. “She’s got the biggest purse in town. She gets hit on 10 times a day, seven days a week.” Wallis, who is not unaware of why she is suddenly so popular, has been known to remind people, “My name is spelled W-a-l-l-i-s, not W-a-l-l-e-t.”

On March 26, le tout L.A. turned out for the opening of the super-high-tech Annenberg Space for Photography, in Century City. The inaugural exhibition was devoted to eight Los Angeles photographers, including Julius Shulman, the doyen of modernist architectural photography, Catherine Opie, the avant-garde social documentarian, and Greg Gorman, the Hurrell of contemporary Hollywood. The 10,000-square-foot building, with its digital-projection and traditional print galleries, library, and workshop, is designed to be a meeting place for the area’s visual-arts community. It even includes an open kitchen, known as Wally’s Café, where Wallis plans to host salon-style dinners cooked by famous local chefs. (“Talk about synergies,” she says.)

On April 25, Wallis cut the ribbon at the opening of the Annenberg Community Beach House, at Santa Monica State Beach, California’s first public beach club of its kind, featuring everything from a café on the sand to valet parking for bicycles. Originally the site of the 110-room playhouse of William Randolph Hearst’s movie-star mistress, Marion Davies, and later the private Sand and Sea Club, the five-acre property was slated for commercial development. After reading about it in the L.A. Business Journal, Wallis swiftly intervened with a $27.5 million kickoff grant from the Annenberg Foundation. “This community can’t believe her gift,” says Santa Monica city planner Barbara Stinchfield. “We call her Saint Wallis.”

Last year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma), of which Wallis is a trustee, announced that the Annenberg Foundation was making a $23 million gift for the acquisition of the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon collection of 19th- and 20th-century photographs. Among the 3,500 master prints are works by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Eugène Atget, Imogen Cunningham, and Man Ray. “Famous, famous, famous pictures!” says Michael Govan, C.E.O. and Wallis Annenberg director of lacma, a title that reflects an earlier grant of $10 million from the Annenberg Foundation. Govan explains that the recent gift also provides an endowment and capital to help build storage facilities for the museum’s photographic holdings. “That’s not something every donor thinks of doing,” he notes. “Wallis has that sense of big, civic, long-term investments.” Unsurprisingly, lacma’s photography department was renamed the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography.

Then there are the Wallis Annenberg Concourse at the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, in Westwood; the Wallis Annenberg Building for Science Learning and Innovation at the California Science Center, in Exposition Park; and the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, a lavish conversion and expansion of the landmark Beverly Hills Post Office, due to open in 2012. Although there are those who grumble that Walter Annenberg’s daughter is on an ego trip, Wallis doesn’t see it that way. “If there’s criticism, we haven’t heard it,” she says. “Since 1989, our foundation has awarded over 8,000 grants and $4 billion in contributions, including over 500 grants of $1 million or more. So, relative to that, our name isn’t on that many projects.”

“Wallis is great,” says Stephanie Barron, a senior lacma curator and a friend of three decades. “I think she has grown into being Wallis, and it has really been beautiful to watch that process. Walter was such a larger-than-life figure, and it was always all about Walter. Wallis has had a lot of years of being in the wings. She is ready to take center stage. I have such respect for the way she blends what’s important to her with the mantle of the Annenberg legacy—which can’t be easy.”

Wallis Huberta Annenberg’s life has had more than its share of both privilege and tragedy. She was born in Philadelphia on July 15, 1939, to Walter Hubert Annenberg and his first wife, Bernice Veronica Dunkelman, known as Ronny, a vivacious socialite from a rich Toronto family. At the time of Wallis’s birth, her father and her grandfather Moses Annenberg, who had started the business with the Daily Racing Form, were under investigation for tax evasion. Wallis’s brother, Roger, was born on the same date a year later, and a week before Moses, having pleaded guilty to save Walter, began serving a three-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Determined to restore the family fortune and name, Walter took charge of the business and went on to create its cash cow, TV Guide, in the early 50s.

Wallis and Roger grew up at Inwood, a gloomy, heavily wooded 15-acre estate on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Roger, who had been born with a cleft palate, was shy and artistic. Wallis was the tomboy, who loved accompanying her father to football games at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater.

When Wallis was 10, her parents divorced. Was that traumatic for her? “No,” she says cheerfully. “My mother made everything fun. She married a man from Washington, D.C., who was the largest Chevrolet dealer in the United States at that time, Ben Ourisman. And she sat me down on the train and handed me a piece of paper. She said, ‘I’m getting married to Ben, and you are going to sing this song at the wedding.’ I had to stand up and give a toast and sing, ‘Hurray for the name of Ourisman Chevrolet / For service and sales we’re here to stay.’ I adored my mother. She was a knockout and had the personality to go with it. She gave great parties—they were just like the ads in The New Yorker, where the glasses were clinking and the scotch looked good. I would visit Inwood on the weekends. Now, there you could hear a pin drop.”

A year after his divorce, Walter had married Leonore “Lee” Cohn, a Stanford graduate and a niece of Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn. Lee had had two previous husbands—casino operator Beldon Katleman and Schenley-liquor owner Lewis Rosenstiel—and a daughter with each. “I give Lee a lot of credit for my father’s success,” says Wallis. “She nurtured him and polished his image. She took him out of Brooks Brothers seersucker suits and gave him a totally different look—more Savile Row.”

The atrium of Sunnylands, the home of Lee and Walter Annenberg near Palm Springs, decorated by Billy Haines, with paintings by van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin, and a sculpture by Jean Arp. By Feliciano.

After graduating from Washington’s National Cathedral School, in 1957, Wallis enrolled at Pine Manor Junior College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The writer Kay Gilman, one of her classmates, says, “Wally had a tremendous sense of humor—very ironic and deadpan. She could have been a stand-up comedian. She could take anything and make it funny—even things that were not funny at all.” Gilman recalls that Roger, who was then at Harvard, “would come over to Pine Manor on his motorcycle in his black leather jacket, which was considered rebellious in those days. Wallis and Roger were very close and very supportive of each other.”

Though he had not yet been diagnosed as schizophrenic, Roger had already begun showing signs of instability; at 15, he refused to return to school in Washington and attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. “My father’s answer to that was discipline,” says Wallis, who explains that her mother could not cope with Roger’s problem, so he moved back to Inwood. “My brother lived in a sort of Restoration dreamworld. His idol was Bill Buckley [the conservative icon]. Roger loved to affect his way of speaking, and he’d wear suits like Buckley’s. I’ll never forget when Roger turned 16. My father asked him, ‘What would you like in the way of a car?’ And Roger said, ‘Dad, instead of a car, I’d like a harpsichord.’ My brother could speak in rhymed couplets. The day I was married, he came into my room and said, ‘Our blood will turn from red to blue / Although our money is but new.’” Two years later, Roger, who had left Harvard and entered a psychiatric institution in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, died after taking an overdose of Seconal.

Wallis graduated fourth in her class from Pine Manor in 1959 and was accepted at Columbia University. To celebrate, Walter and Lee took her on a month-long trip to Europe. In Venice, Wallis met and fell in love with Seth Weingarten, a Princeton graduate who was starting medical school at Yale. A year later, Wallis dropped out of Columbia, and they were married at Inwood. Their daughter, Lauren, was born in New Haven in 1961. Wallis named the boy that followed Roger, in memory of her recently deceased brother. (Sadly, at age 15, he would be diagnosed with the same illness as his uncle and sent to a special school in Santa Barbara.) The Weingartens had two more sons: Gregory, who was born in Manhattan during Seth’s residency at New York Hospital, and Charles, who was born in Roswell, New Mexico, where Seth was doing his military service. “It was a wonderful experience,” says Wallis of their time on the Walker Air Force Base. “The only two happy years in my marriage. We lived in a little $5,000 government house—of course, I made some improvements. I air-conditioned. And everyone built their own fences, but I had Sears Roebuck, which was the only store in town, come out and build the fence for us. After my husband and I left, the commanding officer of the base took over our little house.

Wallis with her father at a racetrack in London, where he served as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1969 to 1974. Courtesy of Wallis Annenbeg.

“Now, by this time I had four children, two cocker spaniels, and a wonderful housekeeper from Juárez, Mexico. My husband was planning to go back to New York Hospital, but I begged him to look at U.C.L.A. So he went, he looked, and that was it. That’s how I got to California.”

The marriage lasted 15 years, ending in an acrimonious divorce in 1975. Never once during our interviews did Wallis refer to her ex-husband by name. As Kay Gilman says, “Seth is topic non grata with her. In fact, at a book party she gave me in 1997, this guy came up to her and said, ‘I saw your ex-husband the other day.’ Wallis told him, ‘I haven’t seen him for 20 years myself, and I don’t care to talk about him.’”

Wallis’s friend David Jones, the Los Angeles society florist, says, “Seth kind of squashed her. She didn’t have a lot of fire in those days. She was very insecure with him.”

After her divorce, Walter bought Wallis a $2 million, 22-room house on Ridgedale Drive in Beverly Hills, which had been designed by the Hollywood architect Wallace Neff for a Vanderbilt heir in the 1930s. Ted Graber, who had worked with the late Billy Haines on Sunnylands, Walter and Lee’s grand estate near Palm Springs, was brought in to help Wallis decorate the house. They added a guest wing for Walter and Lee to stay in when they were in Los Angeles. But all this luxury could not conceal the fact that Wallis was falling apart.

In 1978, Seth Weingarten went to court—publicly accusing Wallis of using drugs, drinking excessively, and having affairs with women—and won custody of the children. A year later, according to Christopher Ogden’s book Legacy, Weingarten offered Wallis full custody. He had moved in with and would eventually marry the rich ex-wife of Del Webb, the billionaire developer of Sun City retirement communities. For her part, Wallis made a serious effort to pull herself together, including seeing a therapist and spending time at the newly founded Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage. Looking back, she puts a positive spin on what had to have been a painful period of her life. “I did it all,” she admits. “If you want to term it a wild phase, fine. I would prefer to say I’m grateful for every one of the life experiences that I had. And I had them.”

Going to work at TV Guide brought structure to her life. “Wallis took that job very seriously,” says Gary Pudney, who was then an executive vice president of ABC-TV. “It certainly didn’t hurt that her father owned the magazine, but she made her own name. Every day she had lunch with the people who were important in television at the time—Norman Lear, Jerry Perenchio, Garry Marshall, Aaron Spelling, Doug Cramer. She would interview them, and these conversations got transcribed for story ideas. Her house became the focal point for TV social events. In fact, the president of ABC Entertainment, Tony Thomopoulos, was married to Cristina Ferrare DeLorean at Ridgedale.” Dynasty divas Joan Collins and Linda Evans were regulars at Wallis’s parties, along with Richard Chamberlain and Carol Burnett, but she also hosted memorable dinners for such distinguished guests of honor as modern-dance genius Martha Graham and Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger.

Meanwhile, Walter and Lee, who had become close to the British royal family when he served as President Nixon’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, from 1969 to 1974, reached new heights of influence and prestige upon the election of their good friend Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. For the next eight years the president, First Lady Nancy Reagan, half of the Cabinet, and the entire “Kitchen Cabinet” would gather at Sunnylands to celebrate New Year’s Eve. “I went to all those parties. I didn’t have a choice,” says Wallis. “It was very interesting to watch the Rose Bowl Game on New Year’s Day with President Reagan. He would just tell stories that came to his mind, one after the other. Here I am, sitting on the sofa with the president of the United States. It was a very heady experience.”

“President Reagan liked Wally a lot,” says Pudney, who was often her escort. “Those parties were history in the making. You would meet Margaret Thatcher or Colin Powell. Frank Sinatra would sing, and Bob Hope was the M.C. Wally used to tell me she went because it was her job and that’s what she got paid for, and at a certain point she stopped going. People say that she and Lee didn’t get along, but they did. Lee took very good care of Walter, and Wally adored her father.” Pudney points out that the Annenbergs built a guesthouse for Wallis on the property, which had its own golf course. “She loved to play golf with her father. And when he died, she stopped golfing.”

In 1991, three years after Walter sold Triangle, Wallis’s magazine career came to an end. “I expected to be the first to be let go, but Rupert Murdoch kept me on and fired all these executives of my father’s who used to treat me like I wasn’t there,” Wallis says. “And did I get a kick out of the worm turning.”

With her children grown and living on their own, Wallis decided to give up her Beverly Hills mansion—it would eventually be bought by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. “I found this wonderful gated community, and I love it,” she says, sitting in the library of her two-story villa in Century Woods, an exclusive condominium development adjacent to Century City. “I can walk to work. I can walk my dogs in the morning in my bathrobe and leave my door unlocked. How many people can live like this without being stuck in the desert or at some resort?”

The house is elegant but comfortable, with a mix of English, Art Deco, and modern furniture and an impressive collection of photographs—Helmut Newton, Philippe Halsman, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bruce Weber, Peter Beard, Irving Penn. She especially loves Berenice Abbott’s picture of a newsstand in 1935. “It reminds me of my grandfather,” she says. “You can see the Daily Racing Form—10 cents.” David Fahey, the leading Los Angeles photography dealer, says, “She goes for the powerful images. A lot of collectors stay in one particular niche or genre, but she likes photojournalism, she likes fashion, she likes young contemporary photographers and classic 20th-century images.”

Wallis with one of her three Maltese in front of a 2007 work featuring the actress Monica Bellucci by photographer Bettina Rheims. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

As Wallis and I talk, California attorney general Jerry Brown, the once and possibly future Democratic governor of the state, arrives for a quick drink on his way to dinner. He explains that the Annenberg Foundation is supporting a public charter school for the arts in Oakland, which he started when he was mayor of that city. “Wallis gave a very substantial donation to move it into a restored 1928 movie palace this year. And we didn’t have to go through a lot of paperwork, which was great. Based on this experience, I would say the creativity of the school was matched by the creativity of the donor.”

Our next stop is dinner at Spago with Betsy Bloomingdale’s son Robert and his wife, Justine. The Annenberg Foundation supports an organization that Justine is deeply committed to, the Ojai Foundation’s Council project, which works to turn around the lives of inner-city kids. “Wallis spends her entire day giving money to things that you wouldn’t expect her to,” says Robert Bloomingdale. “She’s open to everything.”

Leonard Aube, the executive director of the Annenberg Foundation, sitting in its sleek, art-filled headquarters on a high floor of a Century City tower, says, “Wallis’s approach to philanthropy is to look for vision-driven leaders. If you’re doing something in the community, and you’re exceptional, like Geoffrey Canada, with the Harlem Children’s Zone, she’s going to support you. If you’re a world-class marine biologist, like Dr. Roger Payne, who discovered that humpback whales sing, and you want to save an 1863 paint factory in Gloucester, Massachusetts, so you can move the Ocean Alliance headquarters into it, she’s going to support that.”

“Jane Goodall, Jerry Brown, Geoff Canada, Steven Spielberg with the Shoah Foundation—they’re the real heroes,” says Wallis. “Nothing can get done without these people. And that’s what I’m supporting: their vision.” Two other “visionaries” she cites are Ernest Wilson III, the new dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at U.S.C., and lacma director Michael Govan. The day Wilson’s appointment was publicly announced, she pledged a $1 million grant from the foundation and told him, he says, “it was start-up money to do some exciting things.” Likewise, almost immediately after Govan was hired, in 2006, she gave the museum an exploratory grant of $2 million for his pet project: the installation of a 170-foot-high Jeff Koons sculpture of a locomotive hanging from a crane in front of the museum, which Govan sees as Los Angeles’s Eiffel Tower. She has since had second thoughts, however, and says she will leave it to other trustees to fund the $25 million project. “I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane,” says Wallis, “and when the Vernon Collection came up, I thought, This is where my heart is.” She adds, “I think the world of Michael. He’s doing quite a job.”

Two years before her father died, Wallis tells me, she suggested to him that they open an office on the West Coast. “He thought it was a marvelous idea. It had never occurred to him. And so it happened.” She also persuaded him to include her three children as trustees. “It was very important for me to bring their perspectives and interests into the foundation. And I never wanted my children to wait for me to slip on a banana peel.” Wallis notes that in the foundation’s governing documents her father specified that in perpetuity only his direct descendants could be trustees, with the single exception of Lee.

Wallis’s daughter, Lauren Bon, a graduate of Princeton and M.I.T. and a multi-media artist, has initiated foundation projects that combine Earth Art with socially conscious environmentalism. Gregory, a painter who lives with his family in Paris, has channeled his interests in the arts and “global well-being” through more traditional organizations, such as the World Monuments Fund and the American Friends of the Paris Opera & Ballet. (His mother, an Obama supporter, thought he would have made the perfect American ambassador to France.) The youngest sibling, Charles, a filmmaker with degrees from Duke and U.S.C., has expanded the foundation’s activities to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, supporting everything from the Anwu School for underprivileged children in rural China to the Rescue Foundation for female victims of human trafficking in India.

“This generation is saying the foundation is about the power of communication,” says Leonard Aube, who was the first employee hired by Wallis, in late 2003. “It’s about getting people together to discuss touchy issues, progressive issues—whatever it is, let’s get people together. So it’s been an amazing time, because they have had to learn, all this. Frankly, it was a blank canvas—there wasn’t any framework in place when the ambassador passed away. All of a sudden, Wallis was in a leadership role, without any experience of being a leader. We had our first board meeting a month after I started. We are incredibly unorthodox. In most foundations, the boardroom is the hallowed place, where the trustees convene in private. Well, in our shop there’s a 10-foot plate-glass window that looks into the boardroom—it’s wide open. And this is Wallis—everybody who works at the Annenberg Foundation attends board meetings, regardless of rank, including the receptionist.”

When I ask Wallis which of the foundation’s hundreds of projects are closest to her heart, she names the Universally-Accessible Treehouse, designed to accommodate handicapped people, in Torrance, California. “I had read that Paul Newman had done this at his camp for children in Connecticut, and I said, ‘We’re going to do this in L.A.’ I think one of the most moving days of my life was when I got to push the first child, a young man about 12 years old, in a wheelchair, up that ramp.

“I want to do the Mayo Clinic for companion animals,” she continues. “The idea is to teach people a reverence for animals and to tie it in to the local ecology and environment. After two years of negotiations, we have a magnificent piece of land in Rancho Palos Verdes.” Officially called the Annenberg Project at Lower Point Vicente, the 20-acre oceanfront site will include a model adoption center for cats and dogs. “I call it my last hurrah, but who knows? My father used to say that about every project he ever did. And it was never his last hurrah.”

No one believes this will be hers, either. In fact, next year the foundation will launch a project called Alchemy, a leadership-development-and-training initiative for nonprofit executives and volunteer leaders. And ground has already been broken on a visitors’ center adjacent to Sunnylands, which will be open to the public for architectural tours and will also serve as a high-level retreat for world leaders, much as it did while Walter and Lee Annenberg were alive. The 202-acre, pink-walled estate will be administered by the Annenberg Trust at Sunnylands. Wallis and her three children sit on that board along with Lee’s daughters from her first two marriages, Diane Deshong and Elizabeth Kabler, and their children. Family friends wonder how this will work out, given that Wallis was noticeably absent at the service her stepsisters held for their mother at Sunnylands. She told me she is also not planning on attending the special tribute to Lee at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music on September 24, which will have Prince Charles and George H. W. and Barbara Bush as honorary co-hosts. Of her late stepmother, Wallis now says, “She lived a wonderful life. I wish it on all of us—to live to 91 and experience all that she did. She and my father were a true love match. And she was a hell of a golfer.”